I’m going to post this on my blog at own domain as a placeholder, though this is primarily aimed at people who still follow me on LiveJournal.

LiveJournal is almost certainly going away. By which I don’t mean that I’m deleting my LiveJournal. What I mean is that the owners of LiveJournal in Russia continue to make it clear that customers outside of Russia are operating on borrowed time. This week for a while they blacklisted Dreamwidth’s servers, meaning that crossposting, importing, and so-forth between the two services stopped working for a while. I exported and moved my entire LiveJournal archive to Dreamwidth years ago for reasons explained before. And then have subsequently purchased my own domains (FontFolly.Net) and maintain my journal there. I still cross-post to Dreamwidth from FontFolly.Net which triggers a cross-post to LiveJournal, but how long that works is entirely up to the owners of LiveJournal.

And if you still aren’t aware of why this is an issue: LiveJournal is laying off it’s U.S. staff, and has moved their servers to Russia, which means your data and so forth is no longer protected by U.S. laws. The owners have also removed HTTPS security on everything but the payment page which should concern you, because ack of secure socket technology means hackers, spies, governments, and yes, even your nosy next-door neighbor may be able to spy on you while you’re on LJ.

I’m not accusing the owners of anything nefarious, here, I just think it’s very clear that the majority of their business and interest is in Russia, and all journals originating outside Russia are not a priority. Service for those of us outside the U.S. is almost certainly going to continue to degrade. Our journals may simple vanish altogether.

A lot of people are archiving their LiveJournals so as not to lose those years of journaling (instructions to do so HERE). I did that some time ago when I imported everything to Dreamwidth. Dreamwidth uses a fork of the original open source LJ code, so if you’ve stuck with LiveJournal because it’s easy and familiar, you’ll find using Dreamwidth is a very similar experience. You’ll also find that a lot of people who used to be on LiveJournal are over there. Some still crossposting like I do, so you may not be aware that some people you’re following here have actually decamped.

I have two selfish reasons I’m posting about this again. The first is that I would hate to lose the readers who still follow me here (regularly clicking over to my journal at FontFolly.Net, and occasionally leaving comments here). The other is that for a few of you, the only way I get any news about what’s happening in your life is by checking your Livejournal on my Friends’ feed, and I would hate to lose contact with you that way.

Regardless of what anyone still using LiveJournal decides to do with their journals there, I hope that you will at least make a note of the ways to find me on the net: follow my WordPress-based blog on FontFolly.Net (you don’t have to have a WordPress account to do so); follow me on Twitter at @FontFolly, follow the cross-posting from FontFolly.Net to my Dreamwidth journal.

To repeat: I’m not doing this to tell anyone you must stop using LiveJournal (though the current lack of secure socket support is extremely worrying). I’m seriously considering disabling comments on LiveJournal because I have to log in to their now NOT-secure site to reply, and that just doesn’t seem wise.